time, and the engine can take care of breaking it up into streamable chunks. It can take care of the more technical aspects of how to build a proxy mesh to visualise a distant part of the world that has been streamed out. The engine can more or less handle those complexities for you, so that smaller teams without a lot of technical specialisation or large art teams, can build amazing experiences. And I think that really then gets into the ecosystem. It gets into the Quixel Megascan library, MetaHumans, Sketchfab, the ability to get access to all of this high quality content in a free or affordable manner, and be able to bring it into the editor very, very easily, and build up amazing looking content without having to develop every single piece of content yourself.
Whenever new tech is in the hands of users, they start doing stuff that surprises you. Have there been examples of that? Teddy Bergsman: Well, maybe the first thing that was surprising was the meme of creating lots of bananas in Unreal Engine. There’s a banana within the Megascans library that became widely used. That was a surprise. NP: Yeah, there are certainly a number of those memes that were surprising, fun and interesting. A large number of people were figuring out how to
have a million crabs, I think was one. I think somebody photoscanned a dog in a bed and then replicated it a million times to get to a billion triangles, so there were a lot of people playing around with what’s possible. But I think going beyond Nanite and Lumen, I started to see a lot of people experimenting with Chaos Physics and some of the new tools around there. So just building environments and starting to blow them up, starting to play around with dynamics and destruction and just starting to put together all of the tools, all the pieces, into an interesting result.
A recent report said that the number of casual games in development has gone up 13 per cent in a year, and casual gaming revenue is up 40 per cent. Cross platform development has doubled in five years. How does UE5 appeal to studios eager to jump on those trends? NP: One interesting thing with Unreal Engine that was true of Unreal Engine 4 and continues into Unreal Engine 5, is that we always think about how to build content that scales across platforms and how to build tools that allow developers to take content and represent it across multiple platforms. So we maintain a consistent lighting and shading model
across mobile PC and console. We maintain tools for LOD and scalability that work across platforms. So, part of it is that as you start building content, you have tools to be able to scale it and work across multiple platforms. So I think
cross platform development and scalability have always been important. And also feeling like you don’t necessarily need to make a choice at the beginning of your project that’s going to lock you into only being able to work with one platform or another. You can use the tools in the engine in order to help scale across platforms
What UE5 games are you personally looking forward to? NP: It is hard to pick one. It’s sort of like asking parents to pick their favourite child, right? I’m excited about a lot of games that are in development, both ones that the public is aware of as well as ones that other studios are working on. I won’t myself commit
to picking a favourite child, I’m sorry. TB: I think for me it’s Black Myth: Wukong, which was originally developed on UE4. That was actually a surprise to me seeing the team already migrating to UE5 during early access, taking that risk. But it being such a small team creating such a high quality triple-A-looking game is something that makes me personally very excited.
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